A tour through Havana and decades of Cuba policy
The videotaped message went out Wednesday morning, an unexpected and jolting announcement in which President Barack Obama spelled out his plan to resume diplomacy with Cuba.
“Today, the United States of America is changing its relationship with the people of Cuba,” Obama said. “We will begin to normalize relations between our two countries.”
“Normalize.” It was a word that Michael Sykes has waited decades to hear from the mouth of a U.S. president.
And although Sykes was not taken off guard by the announcement — “I make it a point to know people who are involved,” he told me the following day — he knew it signaled the end of an era in which it has been next to impossible for average Americans to visit what he extols as a charming, colorful outpost in the Caribbean.
From a small office on the second floor of a Fallbrook office building, Sykes has helped thousands of people through the painstaking process of visiting Cuba under a Treasury Department program called People to People.
With his wife, Catalina, and a small staff, Sykes spends every winter and spring sending Americans to the streets and art galleries of Havana, and he has visited well over 150 times himself.
“I certainly have more friends there than I do here, and I have a lot more fun,” he told me when I visited on Thursday. “I lead two lives, and my life here is quite mundane.”
In the mid-1990s, Sykes traveled to Havana to take pictures, and enjoyed it so much that he rented an apartment there and spent at least a week or two every month on the island.
He met Catalina, a native of Uruguay, while frequenting a chartered flight from Tijuana to Havana that she was coordinating at the time.
The two married and opened a travel agency in Mexico, and when the Clinton administration introduced the people-to-people concept in 1999, they secured a license under the new program.
After 20 years of traveling to Cuba, and 15 years of helping others to do so under federal guidance, he knows the situation about as well as anybody.
And Sykes makes no attempt to sugar-coat his opinion: Namely, that although its Communist government is dysfunctional, it has posed no real threat to the U.S. — either physically or ideologically — for a long time.
He is cynical about the politics driving American foreign policy toward Cuba, and sympathetic to the human suffering that has resulted there as a result of powerful economic restrictions enforced since the embargo went into place in 1960.
Chief among those restrictions, according to Sykes, was the way that the federal government went after banks for doing business in Cuba.
“They (fined) some big Swiss banks for being intermediaries on Cuban transactions, and all the banks — all the banks — said, ‘We’re not going near anything that has to do with Cuba,’” he recalled. “So everybody who had something to do with Cuba started finding out their banks were closing their accounts, saying it wasn’t worth the risk.
“If I need to wire money to Cuba, it’s a nightmare,” he explained. “It takes weeks and weeks for a wire to go through. Americans cannot use credit cards in Cuba, so with all my groups going to Cuba, I have to bring down many thousands of dollars to pay for services.”
The only reason Sykes has been able to operate legitimate tours in Cuba at all is because the Obama administration reinstated the People to People program in 2011, seven years after it was suspended.
Overseen by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control, Cuba Cultural Travel and other tour operators under the program are held to strict standards. Their itineraries are picked apart to make sure that they are not taking Americans on pleasure tours around Havana, and travelers are given daily spending limits and prohibited from returning with souvenirs.
What remains unclear is how these regulations will be handled going forward.
Sykes believes People to People permits will still be required to visit Cuba, at least for a while longer, but senses that enforcement may ease up somewhat.
“They’ve put a lot of conditions on us — a lot of reporting. It’s almost punitive, what they make you do,” he told me. “I don’t know if they’ll change that or not.”
Sykes said that he remains keenly interested in what exactly the Obama administration can do about Cuba without congressional action, which may take years and would be necessary before travel restrictions can be fully reversed.
When Congress does move to end the regulations, it will surely change the way Sykes does business, transforming Cuba Cultural and dozens of other People to People operators into more conventional tour companies overnight.
It might not be especially good for business, but at least it would be better for American travelers — and vastly better for the Cubans whom Sykes loves.
Until that day, life goes on as usual at his Alvarado Street offices in downtown Fallbrook.
Earlier this month, Sykes accompanied a group of travelers from the New York State Bar Association to Havana, and before that it was a contemporary art museum and a couple of photo groups.
This season’s list of tours includes a San Francisco women’s club, a Jewish center in Philadelphia, a church and Stanford University — one of his biggest clients.
Sykes will return to Havana again soon, no doubt, and when he does he will need to check in on his photo exhibit, which opened Dec. 10 with a display of the colorful canvas prints he wrangled through customs on a recent trip.
“Honestly, I don’t think there’s been an American photographer who’s exhibited for 30 years in Cuba,” he said. “Because it’s been impossible.”
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